ZAGREB, 23 Feb 2022 - The Croatian-Ukrainian Friendship Society has called on the Croatian Parliament to follow the example of other parliaments and recognise the Holodomor, the great famine of the early 1930s when over seven million people were starved to death, as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
This crime, committed on the basis of Soviet laws, has all elements of genocide, says the proposal adopted by the association's assembly on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor.
The association said in a statement, signed by its president Đuro Vidmarović, that the Holodomor was organised and carried out by the government and highest political authorities of the Soviet Union's totalitarian communist regime in 1932 and 1933, when "over seven million people were killed in the most terrible way."
Raphael Lemkin, one of the authors of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was quoted as saying that "the Holodomor in Ukraine is a classic example of Soviet genocide."
Its purpose was to destroy Ukrainian educated elites, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian peasantry and replace them with non-Ukrainians resettled from Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union, according to Lemkin.
The Holodomor as a crime of genocide has already been condemned by countries such as Ukraine, Australia, Hungary, Lithuania, the Holy See, Georgia, Poland, Canada, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Latvia, Portugal and the United States, and steps have been taken in many countries to recognise this genocide, the statement said.
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